Wisconsin’s Republican Assembly leader announced Wednesday that he’s created a panel to investigate the criteria for impeachment as he mulls taking that unprecedented step against a liberal state Supreme Court justice.
Republicans are targeting Justice Janet Protasiewicz over comments she made during her winning campaign about redistricting and nearly $10 million in donations she received from the state Democratic Party.
The impeachment criteria panel being created by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos will consist of three former Wisconsin Supreme Court justices whom Vos told The Associated Press he would not name until after their work is done. Vos said they were not being paid and he expected their work to be complete in the “next few weeks.”
The move to further investigate possible impeachment against Protasiewicz comes the day after Vos and Republicans introduced a bill, modeled after the law in Iowa, where new maps would be drawn by nonpartisan legislative staff and be approved by the GOP-controlled Legislature for 2024.
But Gov. Tony Evers said he would veto the plan and advocates criticized it because it gives the Legislature the ability to draw maps if those created by the nonpartisan staff are rejected two times.
“That is my last option,” Vos said of the possible impeachment. “They’re making it seem like I’m foaming at the mouth to have an impeachment process. But that is the last thing I want to have happen which is why we have taken what I would say is a pretty radical step to offer a different path.”
Protasiewicz joined the court on Aug. 1, flipping majority control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court from conservative to liberal for the first time in 15 years.
Republicans have called on Protasiewicz to recuse herself from a pair of Democratic-backed redistricting lawsuits seeking to overturn GOP-drawn maps. Republicans argue that she can’t fairly hear the cases because she called the current maps “unfair” and “rigged” during the campaign and accepted nearly $10 million from the Wisconsin Democratic Party.
She has yet to decide on recusal in those cases. But she did recuse from another lawsuit filed this week asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to block any attempts by the Legislature to impeach Protasiewicz. It is up to each justice to decide whether to recuse from a case.
The state’s judicial code prohibits justices and judicial candidates from making promises or commitments to ruling a certain way on any issue, and Protasiewicz adhered to that during her campaign. Earlier this year, the state commission that investigates complaints against judges dismissed ones it had received related to her comments on redistricting.
All but one justice on the Supreme Court has accepted money from political parties and has been outspoken on hot-button issues before winning an election.
Vos said it was his “constitutional duty” to look into impeachment. He told the AP that former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who Vos hired to lead an investigation into the 2020 election and then called an “embarrassment” and fired, would not be one of them.
